|
DEFINITIONS
NOTE: The best definitions and the most current information about dementia are found at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Please visit NINDS for information about prognosis, treatment and research as well.
Learning about plaques and tangles and Tau proteins, however, does not help the person with dementia to deal with his or her frustrations. Learning about the weird experiences caused by the plaques and tangles can help one to talk about the difficulties experienced. These are the neuropsychological deficits that occur.
Neuropsychology is the branch of psychology that deals with the relationship between the nervous system, especially the brain, and cerebral or mental functions such as language, memory, and perception.
Why Are These Terms Important? First understand that we are not physicians or neuropsychologists. We are simply people with dementia struggling to understand what is happening in our own brains and thought processes. We’d like to define these phenomena in ways people with dementia can understand.
Some of the commonly experienced neuropsychological deficits that accompany dementia are:
Agnosia
Aphasia
Abulia
Apraxia/dyspraxia
Confabulation
Confusion
Memory Loss - short-term
|
CONFABULATION is a plausible but imagined memory that fills in gaps in what is remembered
Confabulating is the strangest experience. As a secondary teacher and a school counselor, I was accustomed to being authoritative in my field and honest and open as well. After I got dementia, however, I had several experiences in which I talked about an event I distinctly remembered in front of a number of others who attended as well.
I was so shocked when they spoke up and said,
"Carole, it just didn't happen that way."
It is startling and embarrassing to say the least, particularly when to this day I still have "clear memories" of the event. It seems my mind filled in some memory gaps unconsciously. I wasn't lying, and I wasn't conscious of the fact that I confabulated.
You can understand confabulation somewhat if you can visual a line drawing of a complete square with just a tiny gap in the lines at one corner. When you say, "That's a square," you are not lying. Your mind allows you to complete the square so it is recognizable. You weren't lying, but you unconsciously completed the picture -- which can be very useful in certain circumstances. For example, imagine seeing your spouse approaching you on the street. You can see his/her face clearly except for the places a tree branch covers up. You recognize him nonetheless. If it is only your spouse approaching, it is simply a convenience. But imagine the implications of not recognizing a dog coming at you with snarling, snapping jaws. Being able to fill in the gaps in perception has a distinct survival value.
When people with dementia misperceive or misremember, they simply are unaware of their errors. Therefore, they insist that they are correct. To tell them otherwise is to ask them to trust your perceptions of the world over their own.
Try that on for size and see how it would feel to you . . . "Trust me, that's not a man with a gun in your face . . ."
See?
<grins>
-- Carole
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
